Businesses and AI companies are now required to pay whenever accessing Reddit's post archives, accessing its API to train their large language models from its extensive databank. AIs and LLMs accessing post archives and subreddits on the platform, particularly the human-generated content available on the platform would be available for a price.
Reddit is not exactly gatekeeping its data and information archive present on the platform but would take this opportunity to generate revenue from its available database.
Reddit is Going to Make AI Pay, For Accessing its API and Training LLMs
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Reddit announced its latest update to its terms and building native moderator tools and it centers on making AI pay for accessing the platform's API, particularly for those training their LLMs via subreddits. While it was available for free before, Reddit is now looking to generate revenue from its expansive archives for AI access.
This was also revealed by Reddit founder and CEO, Steve Huffman via the New York Times, where he said "The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable, but we don't need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free."
"Crawling Reddit, generating value and not returning any of that value to our users is something we have a problem with. It's a good time for us to tighten things up," Huffman added.
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Reddit's Human-Generated Post Archives Now Coming with a Price
LLMs and AI have benefited from Reddit for training their systems to gain more knowledge about common and extensive topics, as it is a rich platform mostly contributed by human-generated work. However, Reddit sees the value of its content and post archives and will charge developers a fee, as not all comes for free.
Reddit and its Random but Rich Content
And when we say Reddit has random but rich content, we mean that users can post anything they like and have other Redditors genuinely listen (in this case, read) and bring suggestions, solutions, or comment no matter what they share.
Some content found in the social news aggregator is helpful, and some share bizarre events like when a Razer headset helped deflect a bullet that would have grazed the person.
Redditors have been browsing the platform like ants attracted to sugar, and because of this, the company has decided to give them a feature they long sought to help with their search. The platform recently made user comments searchable through the app, no longer have to browse meticulously to find the information they need.
Reddit is known to employ AI and bots in the platform, and it does not exactly ban or detest machine learning in its platform. The latest move from the company aims to expand more of its revenue by asking AI developers for a fee, to help them grow better by getting access to its API and databanks.
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